Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering A. James Link, working with CBE graduate student Siyan Zhang and the group of Michael McAlpine (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering), has developed a prototype bioelectronic device that can permit the selective detection of low levels of pathogenic bacteria in water or other aqueous media, such as test solutions of pharmaceutical compounds. By integrating antimicrobial peptides with capacitive microelectrode arrays, bacterial concentrations as low as one per microliter could be detected, with nearly a factor-of-100 stronger signal for pathogenic vs. nonpathogenic strains of Escherichia coli. Their research, which will be described in a forthcoming article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), appeared on-line on October 18. For more information, see the news story posted on the Princeton University homepage, or the PNAS research article, “Electrical Detection of Pathogenic Bacteria via Immobilized Antimicrobial Peptides”.